The Oath (5 page)

T
hough he was nearly fifty years old, Rajan Bhutan had only been a nurse for about ten years. He’d arrived with his wife in the United States in his mid-twenties. For some time, he had made do with a succession of retail jobs, selling women’s shoes and men’s clothes in chain stores. This was the same type of work he’d done in Calcutta, although it didn’t suit his personality very well. Small of stature, moody, and somewhat introspective by nature, he had to force himself to smile and be pleasant to customers. But he was efficient, honest, intelligent. He showed up for work every day and would stay late or come in early without complaint, so while he wasn’t much of a salesman, he tended to keep his jobs—his first one at Macy’s Herald Square, where he stayed six years. Then at Nordstrom for five more.

His wife had augmented their income by giving piano lessons and for about ten years they had been reasonably happy in their little apartment in the Haight, the only major disappointment in their lives the fact that Chatterjee was unable to get pregnant. Then, finally, when they were both thirty-five, she thought that the miracle had occurred, but it turned out that the something growing in her womb was not a baby, but a tumor.

After Chatterjee died, Rajan no longer found smiling, or sales, to be tolerable. During the months he’d nursed his wife, though, he’d discovered that giving physical care appealed to him in some important way. Over the next four years, he used up most of his savings going to nursing school full-time, until he finally received his RN from St. Mary’s, and took a full-time job at Portola.

And true to form, he stayed. The doctors and administration liked him for the same reasons his bosses in retail had always kept him on. But he had few if any friends among the nurses. Dark and brooding now to an even greater degree than he’d been before when he’d worked in sales, he made little effort to be personable. But he was good at giving care. Over time, to his shift partners he became almost invisible—competent and polite, albeit distant and with his hooded demeanor, somewhat ominous.

Now he stood over the bed of James Lector. After checking the connections on all the monitors, he smoothed the blanket over the old man’s chest, and turned to look behind him, across the room, where Dr. Kensing was with his partner today, Nurse Rowe, adjusting the IV drip on Mr. Markham, who’d only just been wheeled in from post-op.

Rajan looked back down at Lector, on life support now for these past couple of weeks. He had recently stabilized but who knew for how long? Looking at the old man’s gray, inanimate face, he wondered again—as he often did—about the so-called wonder of modern medicine. The memory came back fresh again—in the last days, they had kept Chatterjee alive and supposedly free from pain with life support and narcotics. But as the years had passed, he’d come to believe that this had really been a needless cruelty—both to him for the false hope and to her for the denial of peace.

He believed in helping the sick, in easing pain. This was his mission, after all, after Chatterjee. But the needless prolongation of life, this was what bothered him now, as it always did when he worked the ICU.

He looked down again at Mr. Lector’s face, then back over to Dr. Kensing and Nurse Rowe, working to save another person who might be permanently brain-damaged at best, should he survive at all.

Folly, he thought, so much of it was folly.

Shaking his head with regret, he sighed deeply and went to the next bed.

Dr. Malachi Ross stopped at the door to the intensive care unit and took a last look to make sure everything was as it should be. The large, circular room had seven individual bed stations for critical cases, and all of them were filled, as they were at all times every day of the year. The odds said that five of the patients in them, and possibly all seven, would not live. Ross knew that this was not for lack of expertise or expense; indeed, the expense factor had become the dominating element of his life over the past years. He was the chief medical director and CFO of the Parnassus Medical Group and keeping costs under control while still providing adequate care (which he defined as the minimum necessary to avoid malpractice lawsuits) was his ever more impossible job.

Which was, he knew, about to enter another period of crisis. In the short term at least. For occupying one of the beds here today was his colleague and chief executive officer, Tim Markham, struck down on his morning run, an exercise he practiced with religious zeal in an effort to stay vigorous and healthy to a ripe old age. Ross supposed there was irony in this, but he had lost his taste for irony years ago.

The monitors beeped with regularity and the other machines hummed. All around the room, white shades had been pulled over the windows against the feeble spring sun.

Markham was in the first bed on the left, all hooked up. He’d been up here for three hours already, the fact that he’d lived this long with such serious injuries some kind of a miracle. Ross took a step back toward the bed, then stopped himself. He was a doctor, yes, but hadn’t practiced in ten years. He did know that the bag for the next transfusion hung from its steel hook next to the bed, where it ought to be. The other IV was still half-full. He had to assume everything was in order.

Exhausted, he rubbed his hands over his face, then found himself looking down at them. His surgeon’s hands, his mother used to say. His face felt hot, yet his hands told him he wasn’t sweating.

Drawing a deep breath, he turned and opened the door to get out.

He stepped out into the hallway where three more ICU candidates, postsurgery or post-ER, lay on their own gurneys attached to monitors and drips. They’d arrived since Markham had been admitted; now, as the beds in the ICU became available, these patients would be transferred inside for theoretically “better” intensive care.

Dr. Eric Kensing was supervising the unit this morning, and now he stood over one of the beds in the hallway, giving orders to a male nurse. Ross had no desire to speak to Kensing, so he crossed to the far side of the hall and continued unmolested the short way down to the ICU’s special waiting room. Distinguished by its amenities from the other spaces that served the same basic purpose, the intensive care waiting room featured comfortable couches and chairs, reasonably pleasant art, tasteful wallpaper, shuttered windows, and noise-killing rugs. This was because a vast majority of the people waiting here were going to hear bad news, and the original architects had obviously thought the surroundings would help. Ross didn’t think they did.

It was just another waste of money.

At the entrance, he looked in, noting with some satisfaction that at least Brendan Driscoll had left the immediate area for the time being and he wouldn’t have to endure his reactions and listen to his accusations anymore. Driscoll was Markham’s executive assistant and sometimes seemed to be under the impression that he, not his boss, was the actual CEO of Parnassus. He gave orders, even to Ross, as though he were. As soon as he’d heard about the accident, Driscoll had evidently left the corporate offices at the Embarcadero to come and keep the vigil at Markham’s side. He’d even beaten Ross himself down here. But now, thankfully, he was gone, banished by an enraged Dr. Kensing for entering the ICU for God knew what reason, probably just because he wanted to and thought he could.

But, disturbing though he could be, Driscoll was nowhere near as serious a problem to Ross as Carla Markham, Tim’s wife. Sitting at one end of the deep couch as though in a trance, she looked up at him and her mouth formed a gash of hostility and sorrow, both instantly extinguished into a mask of feigned neutrality.

“He’s all right,” Ross said. Then, quickly amending it. “The same.”

She took the news without so much as a nod.

He remained immobile, but his eyes kept coming back to her. She sat stiffly, her knees pressed together, her body in profile. Suddenly, she looked straight at him as though she’d only then become aware of his presence. “The same is not all right. The same means he is near death, and that is not all right. And if he does die…”

Ross stepped into the waiting room and put up a hand as though physically to stop her. “He’s not going to die,” he said.

“You’d better hope that’s true, Malachi.”

“We don’t have to talk about that. I’ve heard what you said and you’re right, there were troubles. But no crisis. When Tim comes out of this, we’ll talk it out, make some adjustments, like we have with a thousand other issues.”

“This is not like any of them.”

His mouth began to form a knowing smile. She was so wrong. Instead he cocked his head and spoke with all the conviction of his heart. “Don’t kid yourself,” he said. “They’ve all been like this.” He stared down at her, watching for any sign of capitulation.

But she wouldn’t hold his gaze. Instead, shaking her head once quickly from side to side, she reached some conclusion. “He wasn’t going to make adjustments this time. The adjustments were what kept tearing him apart. If he doesn’t live, I won’t, either.”

He couldn’t be sure if she was referring to living herself—she’d threatened suicide the last time Markham had left her—or to making the kind of adjustments her husband had learned to live with. “Carla,” he began softly, “don’t be—”

But she wasn’t listening. Suddenly, she was standing up in front of him, the semblance of neutrality dropped for now. “I can’t talk to you anymore. Don’t you understand that? Not here, maybe never. There’s nothing to say until we know about Tim. Now excuse me, I’ve got to call the children.” She walked by without glancing at him on her way out of the room.

Ross sat in one of the leather settees and pushed himself back into the chair. He gripped the edges of the armrests to keep his surgeon’s hands from shaking.

Ross heard first the monitor alarm, then the code blue for the ICU. For twenty minutes, the commotion nearly reached the level of bedlam even out in the hallway, when almost as abruptly as it had begun all the activity and noise came to a halt.

And then, suddenly, Tim Markham was dead.

Ross had gotten up out of his chair and was waiting outside the ICU, standing there when Doctor Kensing appeared from inside, his handsome face stricken and drawn. He met Ross’s eye for a moment, finally looking down and away. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I thought we might have got him out of the woods, but…” The words trailed off and the doctor shook his head in defeat and misery.

If he was looking for commiseration, Ross thought, he was barking up the wrong tree. In fact, Ross found himself fighting the urge to say something spiteful, even accusatory. The time would come for that. Kensing had been Ross’s particular nemesis for a couple of years, questioning his medical and business decisions, defying his edicts, crusading against his policies with the rest of the medical staff. Kensing’s presence on the floor now, in the ICU directing Markham’s ultimately failed care, was from Ross’s perspective a bitter but not unwelcome act of fate that he would exploit if he could after the initial impact of the tragedy had passed. But it would have to wait.

Now, Ross had business to which he must attend. He didn’t wait for Kensing to reappear in the hallway with his no doubt self-serving postmortem analysis of what had gone wrong, as if he could know by now. He had no stomach for the condolences, hand-holding and-wringing that he knew would attend the next hours at the hospital. Instead, he left the floor by elevator and got out in the basement parking garage, where he got in his Lexus and contacted his secretary, Joanne, on his cell phone. “Tim didn’t make it,” he said simply. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

D
avid Freeman and Gina Roake, straight-faced, told Dismas Hardy that they were going to continue their walk from Lou’s up to Freeman’s apartment on Mason to look over some documents. Freeman would be back in the office later, if Hardy would be so kind as to tell Phyllis.

“I’d be delighted, David. Any excuse just to hear her sweet voice.”

So, coming into the lobby alone, Hardy was congratulating himself for his restraint in not commenting on David and Gina’s lame document-perusal excuse, when the dulcettoned Phyllis stopped him. “Mr. Elliot from the
Chronicle
would like you to call him as soon as you can.”

“Thank you. Did he say it was important?”

“Not specifically, but I assume so.”

Hardy walked up and leaned against the top of the receptionist’s partition. Phyllis hated when he did that. But then, she hated when he did anything. He smiled at her. “Why?”

“Why what?” Obviously thinking evil thoughts, Phyllis stared at his arms, crossed there on her shelf.

“Why do you assume it’s important?”

To Phyllis, trained by Freeman, everything to do with the law was intrinsically important. Hardy was untrainable, and try as she might to remain the complete professional, she couldn’t seem to maintain her composure when he started in on her. She sighed in exasperation, tried to smile politely but didn’t entirely succeed. “I assume all calls to your office are important, Mr. Hardy. Mr. Elliot took time out in the middle of his workday to call you in the middle of yours. He asked you to call as soon as you could. It must have been something important.”

“He might have just wanted to talk. That happens, you know.”

Clearly, Phyllis believed it was not something that
should
happen. “Would you like me to call him and ask?”

“Why, Phyllis.” Hardy stepped back, took his arms off the shelf, looked at her approvingly. “I think you’ve just told a joke. And during business hours when you should have been working. I won’t tell David.” She remained silent as he turned and got to the stairway up to his office. “Oh, and speaking of David, he won’t be in for a while. He’s with Ms. Roake working on some documents, though I’ve never called it that before.”

“Called what?” Phyllis asked.

Suddenly he decided he’d abused her enough, or almost enough. He pointed up the stairs. “Nothing. Listen, I’ve enjoyed our little chat, but now I’ve got to run and call Mr. Elliot. It could be important.”

Hardy worked in stark, monklike, even industrial surroundings. Gray metal filing cabinets hunched on a gray berber wall-to-wall carpet. The two windows facing Sutter Street featured old-fashioned venetian blinds, which worked imperfectly at best—normally he simply left them either up or down. Rebecca and Vincent, his two children, had painted most of his wall art, although there was also a poster of the Giants’ new home, Pac Bell Park, and a Sierra Club calendar. His blond wooden desk was the standard size, its surface cleared except for his phone, a photo of Frannie, an OfficeMax blotter, a sweet potato plant that reached the floor, and his green banker’s lamp. Under four shelves of law books and binders, the dried blowfish and ship in a bottle he’d brought from home livened up a Formica counter with its faucet, its paper towel roll on the wall, and several glasses, upside down, by the sink. The couch and chairs were functional Sears faux leather, and the coffee table came from the same shopping trip about six years before. His dartboard hung next to the door across from his desk—a piece of silver duct tape on the rug marked the throw line at eight feet. His tungsten blue-flight customs were stuck, two bull’s-eyes and a twenty, where he’d last thrown them.

The phone was ringing as he opened the door, and he reached over the desk, punching his speakerphone button. “Yo,” he said.

Phyllis’s voice again, but giving him no time to reply. “Lieutenant Glitsky for you.”

And then Abe was on. “Guess what I just heard. You’re going to like it.”

“The Giants got Piazza.”

“In the real world, Diz.”

“That’s the real world, and I’d like it.”

“How about Tim Markham?”

“How about him? Is he a catcher? I’ve never heard of him.” Hardy had gotten around his desk to his chair and picked up the receiver.

“He’s the CEO of Parnassus Health,” Glitsky said.

A jolt of adrenaline chased away the final traces of any lunch lethargy. Glitsky usually didn’t call Hardy to keep him up on the day’s news, unless homicide was in the picture, so he put it together right away. “And he’s dead.”

“Yes he is. Isn’t that interesting?”

Hardy admitted that it was, especially after all the talk at Lou’s. But more than that, “Did somebody kill him?”

“Yes, but probably not on purpose. You remember our discussion this morning about hit and runs?”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Nope.”

“Let’s remember not to talk about nuclear holocaust on our next walk. Somebody really ran him over?”

“More like plowed into him. They kept him alive at Portola until a half hour ago, then lost him.”

“They lost him at his own hospital? I bet that was a special moment.”

“It was another thing I thought you’d like. But evidently they couldn’t do much. He was critical on admit and never pulled out.”

“And it was an accident?”

“I already said that.”

“Twice now,” Hardy said. “You believe it?”

“So far.”

Hardy listened to the hum on the line. “The same week he tries to shake down the city? His company’s threatening to go bankrupt? They’re not paying their doctors and they’re screwing around with their patients, and suddenly the architect of all this winds up dead?”

“Yep.”

“And it’s a coincidence? That’s your professional take on it?”

“Probably. It often is, as I mentioned this morning.”

“Except when it isn’t. Lots of things happen that never happened before.”

“Not as often as you’d think,” Glitsky replied. This time, the pause was lengthy. “But you’ve answered my question. I just wanted an opinion from the average man on the street.”

“You’ll have to call somebody a little dumber than me, then,” Hardy said, “but I’ll send you a bill anyway.”

Jeff Elliot’s call turned out to be about the same thing, but he wasn’t interested in Hardy’s coincidence theory, dismissing it even more definitively than Glitsky had with one line. “You don’t murder somebody with a car, Diz, not when guns cost a buck and a half and knives are free.”

“I’d bet it’s been known to happen, although Glitsky says not, too.”

“See? And even if it has, it also has been known to snow in the Sahara.”

“Is that true? I don’t think so. But if it is, it proves my point.”

A sigh. “Diz? Can we leave it?”

Hardy was thinking that all of his friends had lost their senses of humor. He didn’t really think it was probably a murder, either, but it was interesting to talk about, and so much else wasn’t. “Okay, Jeff, okay. So how can I help you?”

“Actually, you can’t. This is just a mercy call, see if you’d like to take the rest of the day off, which I noticed at lunch you might be in the mood for.”

“That obvious, huh?”

“I’m a reporter, Diz. Nothing escapes.”

Hardy looked down at the massive pile of paperwork on the floor by his desk—his own and other lawyers’ briefs, which were anything but. Memoranda. Administrative work that he’d been neglecting. Billing. A couple of police incident reports from prospective clients. The latest updates of the Evidence Code, which it was bad luck not to know. He had an extremely full workload at the moment. He was sure he ought to be glad about this, although the why of it sometimes eluded him.

Elliot was going on. “I’m thinking the shit’s got to be hitting the fan over at Parnassus. It might be instructive to swing over and check things out. See if anybody’ll talk to me and maybe I’ll get a column or two out of it. So what do you say? You want to play some hooky?”

“More than anything,” Hardy said. “But not today, I’m afraid.”

“Is that your final answer?”

He pulled some of the papers over in front of him, desultorily flipped through the stack of them. A trained reporter like Elliot, if he’d been in the room, would have recognized some signs of weariness, even malaise. Certainly a lack of sense of humor. Hardy let out a heavy breath. “Write a great column, Jeff. Make me feel like I was there.”

It wasn’t the kind of thing Glitsky was going to talk about with any of his regular professional associates, but he couldn’t keep from sharing his concerns with his wife.

Jackman let Treya take a formal fifteen-minute break sometimes if she asked, and now she and Abe stood in the outside stairway on the Seventh Street side of the building, sipping their respective teas out of paper cups. An early afternoon wind had come up and they were forced to stand with their backs against the building, the view limited to the freeway and Twin Peaks out beyond it.

“And here I thought you brought me to this romantic spot so we could make out in the middle of the day.”

“We could do that if you want,” Glitsky told her. “I’m pretty easy that way.”

She kissed him. “I’ve noticed. But you were really thinking of something else?”

He told her about Markham, how intensely uncomfortable he was with coincidences, and Markham’s death fell squarely into that category. “But I wasn’t lying when I told Diz that probably it wasn’t an intentional homicide. That was the voice of thirty years’ experience whispering in my ear.”

“But what?”

“But my other guardian angel, the bad one, keeps on with this endless, ‘Maybe, what if, how about…”’

“You mean if somebody ran him down on purpose?”

He nodded. “I’m trying to imagine an early-morning, just-after-light, lying-in-wait scenario, but I can’t convince myself. It just couldn’t have happened in real life. Well, maybe it
could
have, but I don’t think it did.”

“Why not?”

She was about the only person he ever smiled at, and he did now. “How good of you to ask. I’ll tell you. The first and most obvious reason is that the driver didn’t finish the job. Markham lived nearly four hours after the accident, and if he hadn’t been thrown into the garbage can, he might have pulled through it. The driver couldn’t have known he’d killed him. If he’d planned to, he would either have backed up over him or stopped, got out of the car, and whacked Markham’s head a few times with a blunt object he’d been carrying for just that reason.”

“Sweet,” Treya said.

“But true.” He went on to give her the second reason, the one he’d given Hardy. A car was a stupid and awkward choice as a murder weapon. If someone were going to take the time to plan a murder and then lie in wait to execute it, with all the forethought that entailed, Abe thought even a moron would simply buy a gun, which was as easy if not easier to purchase, far more deadly, and simpler to get rid of than any vehicle would be.

“Okay, I’m convinced. He probably wasn’t murdered.”

“I know. That’s what I said. But…”

“But you want to keep your options open.”

“Correct. Which leads me to my real problem. Did you get the impression at lunch today that my friend and your boss Clarence Jackman is going to get considerable political heat around anything to do with Parnassus? The death of its CEO isn’t going to hide out in the
Chronicle
’s back pages and then disappear in a couple of days when it isn’t solved.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Treya agreed.

“So who gets the case, which is definitely a homicide and might conceivably be, but probably isn’t, a murder?”

Treya had been living with the problems within the homicide detail and had a good sense of the dilemma. In the normal course of events, Abe would never have anything to do with this case. It was a hit and run. Someone from that detail would be assigned to locate the vehicle, they probably wouldn’t, and that would be the end of it. Now, because he had Fisk and Bracco, he’d have to give the case to them—in fact, he already had. If he tried to pass it to one of his veteran inspectors, first his guy would be insulted and laugh at him; then the mayor and the supervisor would demand his head, and probably get it.

And then if—wonder of wonders—it turned out to be a real-live, politically charged, high-profile murder after all, he’d have given it to his two rawest players, who would probably screw it all up, and that would not only infuriate Jackman, it might harm the district attorney’s relations with the police department for a good portion of this administration.

“I’d say you’ve got to let the new boys keep it.”

“That’s what I’ve come to myself. But it’s lose-lose.”

“Luckily,” she said, touching his cheek gently, “with all the practice, you’ve gotten so good at those.”

But he had Fisk and Bracco back in his office at the end of the day and gave them the best spin he could put on it. “…an opportunity to give you guys some quality time. You do good on this, people here might be inclined to think you might turn into good cops after all.” He paused, and purposefully did
not
add “and not just political stooges.”

Darrel Bracco was as he’d been this morning, and as he always was in here—standing almost at attention behind the chair where his partner sat. “We never asked to get moved in here, Lieutenant. Neither one of us. But we did jump at the chance. Who wouldn’t?”

“Okay.” Glitsky could accept that. “Here’s your chance to make it work.”

A few minutes later, he was reading from a notepad he’d been filling with ideas as they struck him on and off for most of the afternoon. “…girlfriends? And if so, did they just break up? Then his children. How did he get along with them?”

“Excuse me.” Fisk had a hand up like a third grader.

Glitsky looked over his notepad. “Yes?” With exaggerated patience, “Harlen?”

“I thought this was about all the problems Markham was having with his business? And now you’re talking about his family?”