A Case of Need: A Novel (35 page)

“The publicity wasn’t your fault,” he said. “Besides, I was getting tired of this town. Ready for a change.”

“Where will you go?”

“Back to California, I guess. I’d like to live in Los Angeles. Maybe I’ll deliver babies for movie stars.”

“Movie stars don’t have babies. They have agents.”

He laughed. For a moment, it was the old laugh, the momentary self-pleasure that came when he had just heard something that amused him and had hit upon an amusing response. He was about to speak, then closed his mouth and stared at the floor. He stopped laughing.

I said, “Have you been back to the office?”

“Just to close it up. I’m making arrangements for the movers.”

“When will you go?”

“Next week.”

“So soon?”

He shrugged. “I’m not eager to stay.”

“No,” I said, “I imagine you’re not.”

I
SUPPOSE EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED
afterward was the result of my anger. It was already a rotten business, stinking rotten, and I should have left it alone. There was no need to continue anything. I could let it go and forget about it. Judith wanted to have a farewell party for Art; I told her no, that he wouldn’t like it, not really.

That made me angry, too.

On the third hospital day I bitched to Hammond until he finally agreed to discharge me. I guess the nurses had been complaining to him as well. So they let me go at 3:10 in the afternoon, and Judith brought me clothes and drove me home. On the way, I said, “Turn right at the next corner.”

“Why?”

“I have to make a stop.”

“John—”

“Come on, Judith. A quick stop.”

She frowned, but turned right at the corner. I directed her across Beacon Hill, to Angela Harding’s street. A police car was parked in front of her apartment. I got out and went up to the second floor. A cop stood outside the door.

“Dr. Berry, Mallory Lab,” I said in an official tone. “Have the blood samples been taken yet?”

The cop looked confused. “Blood samples?”

“Yes. The scrapings from the room. Dried samples. For twenty-six factor determinations. You know.”

He shook his head. He didn’t know.

“Dr. Lazare is worried about them,” I said. “Wanted me to check.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” the cop said. “There were some medical guys here yesterday. Those the ones?”

“No,” I said, “they were the dermatology people.”

“Uh. Oh. Well, you better check for yourself.” He opened the door for me. “Just don’t touch anything. They’re dusting.”

I entered the apartment. It was a shambles, furniture overturned, blood spattered on couches and tables. Three men were working on a glass, dusting powder onto it and blowing it off, then photographing the fingerprints. One looked up. “Help you?

“Yes,” I said. “The chair—”

“Over there,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the chair in the corner. “But don’t touch it.”

I went over and stared at the chair. It was not very heavy, a cheap wood kitchen chair, rather nondescript. But it was sturdily made. There was some blood on one leg.

I looked back at the three men. “You dusted this one yet?”

“Yeah. Funny thing. There’s hundreds of prints in this room. Dozens of people. It’s going to take us years to unravel it all. But there were two things we couldn’t get prints from. That chair and the doorknob to the outside door.”

“How’s that?”

The man shrugged. “Been wiped.”

“Wiped?”

“Yeah. Somebody cleaned up the chair and the doorknob. Anyhow, that’s the way it looks. Damned funny. Nothing else was wiped, not even the knife she used on her wrists.”

I nodded. “The blood boys been here yet?”

“Yeah. Came and went.”

“O.K.,” I said. “Can I make a call? I want to check back with the lab.”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

I went to the phone, picked it up, and dialed the weather bureau. When the voice came on, I said, “Give me Dr. Lazare.”

“—sunny and cool, with a high in the mid-fifties. Partly cloudy in late afternoon—”

“Fred? John Berry. I’m over at the room now.”

“—with fifty-percent chance of showers—”

“Yeah, they say the samples were taken. You sure you haven’t gotten them yet?”

“—tomorrow, fair and colder with a high in the forties—”

“Oh. I see. O.K. Good. Right. See you.”

—“wind from the east at fifteen miles per hour—”

I hung up and turned to the three men. “Thanks,” I said.

“Sure.”

Nobody paid any attention to me as I left. Nobody really cared. The men who were there were doing routine duty. They’d done things like this before, dozens of times. It was just routine.

I
WAS IN A BAD MOOD MONDAY
. I sat around for most of the morning drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and tasting a lousy sour taste in my mouth. I kept telling myself that I could drop it and nobody would care. It was over. I couldn’t help Art and I couldn’t undo anything. I could only make things worse.

Besides, none of this was Weston’s fault, not really. Even though I wanted to blame somebody, I couldn’t blame him. And he was an old man.

It as a waste of time. I drank coffee and told myself that, over and over. A waste of time.

I did it anyway.

Shortly before noon I drove over to the Mallory and walked into Weston’s office. He was going over some microscopic slides and dictating his findings into a small desk recorder. He stopped when I came in.

“Hello, John. What brings you over here?”

I said, “How do you feel?”

“Me?” He laughed. “I feel fine. How do you feel?” He nodded to the bandages on my head. “I heard what happened.”

“I’m okay,” I said.

I looked at his hands. They were under the table, in his lap. He had dropped them down as soon as I had come into the room.

I said, “Hurt much?”

“What?”

“Your hands.”

He gave me a puzzled look or tried to. It didn’t work. I nodded to his hands and he brought them out. Two fingers of his left hand were bandaged.

“Accident?”

“Yes. Clumsy of me. I was chopping an onion at home—helping out in the kitchen—and I cut myself. Just a superficial wound, but embarrassing. You’d think after all these years I’d know how to handle a knife.”

“You bandaged it yourself?”

“Yes. It was just a small cut.”

I sat down in the chair opposite his desk and lit a cigarette, aware that he was watching me carefully. I blew a stream of smoke out, toward the ceiling. He kept his face calm and blank; he was making it hard for me. But that was his right, I guess. I’d probably do the same.

“Was there something you wanted to see me about?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

We stared at each other for a moment, and then Weston pushed his microscope to one side and turned off the recorder.

“Was it about the path diagnosis on Karen Randall? I’d heard you were concerned.”

“I was,” I said.

“Would you feel better if someone else looked them over? Sanderson?”

“Not now,” I said. “It doesn’t really matter now. Not legally, anyway.”

“I suppose you’re right,” he said.

We stared at each other again, a long silence falling. I didn’t know how to bring it up, but the silence was killing me.

“The chair,” I said, “was wiped. Did you know that?”

For a moment, he frowned, and I thought he was going to play dumb. But he didn’t; instead, he nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “She told me she’d wipe it.”

“And the doorknob.”

“Yes. And the doorknob.”

“When did you show up?”

He sighed. “It was late,” he said. “I had worked late at the labs and was on my way home. I stopped by Angela’s apartment to see how she was. I often did. Just stopped in. Looked in on her.”

“Were you treating her addiction?”

“You mean, was I supplying her?”

“I mean, were you treating her?”

“No,” he said. “I knew it was beyond me. I considered it, of course, but I knew that I couldn’t handle it, and I might make things worse. I urged her to go for treatment, but …”

He shrugged.

“So instead, you visited her frequently.”

“Just to try and help her over the rough time. It was the least I could do.”

“And Thursday night?”

“He was already there when I arrived. I heard scuffling and shouts, so I opened the door, and found him chasing her with a razor. She had a kitchen knife—a long one, the kind you use for bread—and she was fighting back. He was trying to kill her because she was a witness. He said that, over and over. ‘You’re a witness, baby,’ in a low voice. I don’t remember exactly what happened next. I had always been fond of Angela. He said something to me, some words, and started at me with the razor. He looked terrible; Angela had already cut him with the knife, or at least, his clothes …”

“So you picked up the chair.”

“No. I backed off. He went after Angela. He was facing her, away from me. That was when … I picked up the chair.”

I pointed to his fingers. “And your cuts?”

“I don’t remember. I guess he did it. There was a little slash on the sleeve of my coat, too, when I got home. But I don’t remember.”

“After the chair—”

“He fell down. Unconscious. Just fell.”

“What did you do then?”

“Angela was afraid for me. She told me to leave immediately, that she could take care of everything. She was terrified that I would be involved. And I …”

“You left,” I said.

He looked at his hands. “Yes.”

“Was Roman dead when you left?”

“I don’t really know. He had fallen near the window. I guess she just pushed him out and then wiped up. But I don’t know for sure. I don’t know for sure.”

I looked at his face, at the lines in the skin and the white of the hair, and remembered how he had been as a teacher, how he had prodded and pushed and cajoled, how I had respected him, how he had taken the residents every Thursday afternoon to a nearby bar for drinks and talk, how he used to bring a big birthday cake in every year on his birthday and share it with everyone on the floor. It all came back, the jokes, the good times, the bad times, the questions and explanations, the long hours in the dissecting room, the points of fact and the matters of uncertainty.

“Well,” he said with a sad smile, “there it is.”

I lit another cigarette, cupping my hands around it and ducking my head, though there was no breeze in the room. It was stifling and hot and airless, like a greenhouse for delicate plants.

Weston didn’t ask the question. He didn’t have to.

“You might get off,” I said, “with self-defense.”

“Yes,” he said, very slowly. “I might.”

OUTSIDE
, cold autumnal sun splashed over the bare branches of the skeletal trees along Massachusetts Avenue. As I came down the steps of Mallory, an ambulance drove past me toward the Boston City EW. As it passed I glimpsed a face propped up on a bed in the back, with an oxygen mask being held in place by an attendant. I could see no features to the face; I could not even tell if it was a man or a woman.

Several other people on the street had paused to watch the ambulance go by. Their expressions were fixed into attitudes of concern, or curiosity, or pity. But they all stopped for a moment, to look, and to think their private thoughts.

You could tell they were wondering who the person was, and what the disease was, and whether the person would ever leave the hospital again. They had no way of knowing the answers to those questions, but I did.

This particular ambulance had its light flashing, but the siren was off, and it moved with almost casual slowness. That meant the passenger was not very sick.

Or else he was already dead. It was impossible to tell which.

For a moment, I felt a strange, compelling curiosity, almost an obligation to go to the EW and find out who the patient was and what the prognosis was.

But I didn’t. Instead I walked down the street, got into my car, and drove home. I tried to forget about the ambulance, because there were millions of ambulances, and millions of people, every day, at every hospital. Eventually, I did forget. Then I was all right.

P
ART OF ANY PATHOLOGIST’S JOB
is to describe what he sees quickly and precisely; a good path report will allow the reader to see in his mind exactly what the pathologist saw. In order to do this, many pathologists have taken to describing diseased organs as if they were food, earning themselves the name, delicatessen pathologists.

Other pathologists are revolted by the practice; they deplore path reports that read like restaurant menus. But the device is so convenient and useful that nearly all pathologists use it, at one time or another.

Thus there are currant jelly clots and postmortem chicken-fat clots. There is ripe raspberry mucosa or strawberry gallbladder mucosa, which indicates the presence of cholesterol. There are nutmeg livers of congestive heart failure and Swiss-cheese endometria of hyperplasia. Even something as unpleasant as cancer may be described as food, as in the case of oat-cell carcinoma of the lung.

D
OCTORS ARE GENERALLY MISTRUSTFUL
of the police and try to avoid police business. One reason:

A brilliant resident at the General was called out of bed one night to examine a drunk brought in by the police. The police may know that certain medical disorders—such as diabetic coma—may closely imitate inebriation, even including an “alcoholic” breath. So this was routine. The man was examined, pronounced medically sound, and carted off to jail.

He died during the night. At autopsy, he was found to have a ruptured spleen. The family sued the resident for negligence, and the police were extraordinarily helpful to the family in attempting to put the blame on the doctor. At the trial, it was decided that the doctor had indeed been negligent, but no damages were awarded.

This doctor later tried to obtain certification from the Virginia State Board to practice in that state, and succeeded only with the greatest difficulty. This incident will follow him for the rest of his life.