Deficiency (14 page)

"We'll take care of her immediately," the undertaker said and assured him everything would be handled properly and with the most possible respect.

"My aunt will be eternally grateful," he told him. She was already in eternity. The gratitude would follow. "I'll be by to discuss the arrangements as soon as possible."

"We understand," the undertaker said.

Was there anyone more understanding than an undertaker? His role, his objectives were crystal clear. He made no value judgements after he tried to get the bereaved to buy as expensive a funeral as he could, but even that he did subtly, never implying any choice was wrong or disrespectful.

In a way he's like me, he thought.

He sucks the living as much as he can and then he leaves them alone and moves on to the next customer.

He turned on the old radio in a wooden casing, found a station with soft but upbeat music, and sat at the kitchen table to enjoy his breakfast.

He took a deep breath and then gazed out the windows facing the east. The sun had already begun to paste itself on the grass and flowers.

He couldn't wait to wallow in its falling rays and have it paste itself on his smile and his heart as well.

The third time Curt heard someone at the law office make reference to Terri and her being on the scene of another young woman's death, he felt a fist of anger in his chest opening and closing with the regularity of a second heart. The rage was inexplicable, even illogical, but nevertheless made its presence clearly known through his snappy replies and the furious way he went at his work. No matter how hard he tried, his eyes would not stay on the pages of the brief before him. His gaze kept wandering toward the framed picture of Terri after her medical school graduation. His father had bought her the new stethoscope and had presented it to her that day. She wore it in the picture. His father's camera had caught the sunlight glittering off it, making it look like a halo at rest.

He recalled being as petulant as a jealous sibling. His parents hadn't made as much of a big deal over his graduation from law school, he thought. Thanks to the O. J. Simpson so-called Dream Team, lawyers, who never enjoyed great popularity, were now the most notorious subjects of derogatory humor ever created. There were probably more lawyer jokes flowing through cyberspace than anything else. He had no tolerance for them anymore and either forced a smile or looked away and changed the subject. Everyone telling the jokes with him in hearing range usually said something like "Present company excluded of course."

Teachers hated it when people in their presence said "Those who can, do and those who can't, teach," didn't they? Yet some of the teachers he knew wouldn't hesitate to tell the latest lawyer joke.

"They hate us until they need us and then they hate us even more," Howard Sages told him a few days ago when a new lawyer joke was being circulated at the county courthouse. Some lawyers were just as responsible for passing the jokes around. To him they were like black people who used the word
nigger
freely.

There were jokes about doctors, for sure, jokes about their penurious ways, their greed, but Howard's remark about people hating lawyers even more when they needed them didn't apply to doctors. People worshipped their doctors, looked upon them as true miracle workers, saviors who had the skill and the wisdom to frustrate and defeat Death. If a lawyer did a good job, it was understood somehow that he or she did it because he or she was well tuned into the corrupt system. They knew how to play the game and they did it with every available trick or method, regardless of the underlying sense of unfairness.

For example, if his client was sued by someone, he would recommend a countersuit, knowing that the legal costs would injure them both and both lawyers would then try to convince the clients to settle and endure less pain. Right and wrong had little to do with it. Use the system to defeat the opponent: prolong, delay, work every convolution until the injured party relented and settled. What was true in civil law was just as true in criminal law. Wear down the prosecutors and the courts and get your client off with the least punishment possible, no matter what he or she had done.

Maybe he should have become a doctor, too, Curt thought, and then he thought how much such a pursuit would have been beyond him. He almost failed chemistry in high school, and he was never fond of the sight of blood. He even fainted once when he had blood taken, something no one knew, not even Terri. And then, the whole idea of touching and cutting and exploring a human corpse was revolting to him. It turned his stomach just to think about it.

Sometimes lately, although he would never dare say anything, he thought about Terri examining sick people and he wondered if she could inadvertently transmit something to him. He tried convincing himself that it was such a ridiculous thought, he shouldn't even permit himself to think it, but he couldn't help it. He had even had a nightmare about himself wearing a surgical mask and surgical gloves while he made love to her and in the nightmare, she turned out to be a corpse. That was when he literally jumped up and nearly fell out of his bed. He was so nauseated afterward, too. He had to take something before he could get back to sleep and when he did, he was afraid to close his eyes, afraid the nightmare still stuck like honey to the inside of his eyelids.

Another thing he had never told her.

A knock on his opened door snapped him out of his musings. He looked up at
one of his partners, Bill Kleckner. Since Curt's father left the firm, he and
the lanky, six-feet-four former high school and college basketball star had taken over most of the litigation. Bill had that troubled expression on his face that usually blossomed at the realization of a critical problem. His light brown hair was short on the sides, but fell over his forehead to the point of covering his eyes. He had the habitual habit of running his fingers through the strands in a repeated motion while talking, even in court, which drove Curt crazy and surely annoyed some judges. Bill's eyes were narrow, dark, and full of concern at the moment as well.

"What's up?"

"You know Dawn Kotein, Dick's wife."

Dick Kotein had been on the same high school basketball team and had gone on to play college ball, too, although not as impressively as Bill had. Now Dick was an architect working out of a Monticello office and building a great reputation. He had thrown some work their way lately.

"So?"

"You know she works at Community General."

"I know all this, Bill. Is there a point?"

He sat, folded his hands and pressed them against his long, flat chest upon which he wore a loose white shirt and an out of style wide tie.

"She works for Dr. Stern in pathology."

"I love it when you come in here and interrupt me and give me pages and pages of information I know. It reinforces my belief in tape replays in sports."

"She told Melanie something a few minutes ago."

"Why didn't you say she told your wife Melanie? You left out something I know."

"Which," Bill said ignoring him, "she claimed no one knows yet, but soon will, about the Martin woman whom Terri tried to save last night."

Curt stopped smiling. He put the pages down on his desk and sat back in his chair.

"And what would that be, Bill?"

"She said she died of an extreme case of beriberi, which is a disease caused by a vitamin deficiency. One of the B's, I think."

Curt stared at him.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Bill asked. "I mean, why is it a secret?"

Curt swallowed.

That fist of anger was opening and closing again, growing, too. He put his right palm over his chest as if he thought Bill would soon be able to see it palpitating.

"I didn't know. She didn't tell me that," he said.

Bill nodded and then shrugged.

"Maybe she didn't know either. Anyway, it's going to cause a stir around here, don't you think? Two young women die of vitamin deficiency diseases within a week of each other?"

Curt nodded.

"Maybe."

"And here's our Terri right in the middle of it all or unfortunately at the wrong places at the wrong time, huh?"

"Unfortunately. I don't think we need to lose any sleep over it," Curt said. "I've got to get back to this," he said tapping the brief. "I'm in court this afternoon."

"Right. Just thought you'd like to know. You going to Roary's for lunch?"

"I'm not going to have time," he said.

"Don't work harder than I do. It makes me look bad," Bill joked, pretended to flip a basketball at a net, and left the office.

Curt stared after him.

Trust, he thought.

Trust is more important than love in a relationship.

The fist beating in his heart thumped on.

"Am I a suspect of some kind?" Terri asked Will Dennis, who was waiting for her at the nurse's station. She had gotten to the hospital a little early and had seen Sally Peters, a fifty-four-year-old widow who suffered serious hypertension.

Will Dennis raised his eyebrows in surprise. She had barely acknowledged him before asking. Perhaps it was her medical training or just being under the sign of Sagittarius that made Terri the type of person who was so direct and to the point. It was to think about all of this while she was attending patients, but all day at the office she found herself slipping into it. Her eyes drifted from charts and her thoughts fell back to the bizarre deaths of both young women, especially Kristin Martin because, as short as it was, she did attempt some therapy.

"Why would you think that, Doctor?" Will responded.

She looked at the nurse on duty and then started away without answering him. Will Dennis walked alongside her. She paused at the elevator and turned to him.

"I don't have any satisfactory medical explanations for you. I told you that you would have to seek out more learned people," she began.

Although Will Dennis's eyes were full of interest and curiosity, he didn't really look at her with suspicion and accusation. Of course, she attributed most of that to his skills at questioning witnesses and suspects, but she also wondered about her own paranoia, something she could lay at Curt's feet for sure.

"We are doing just that, and we're not getting answers that help us along. No one we've spoken with yet, and we've even gone to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, can offer anything that even comes close to a logical, noncriminal cause for all this. It's possible that something you saw, something you remember, might just lead us in a sensible direction."

The elevator door opened.

She nodded.

"You're right. I'm sorry," she said. "It's been a long day and especially made longer by a horrid night."

"I understand," Will said after they stepped into the elevator.

"Well," she began. "As I said, I tried to get her to speak, to tell me if the cause of her difficulties might be an allergy, perhaps to a bee sting. She mouthed something that sounded like
'he.'"

"
He
? That's it?
He
?"

"And I can't even swear to that," she added quickly. "Don't hold me to it."

"No, no, of course not," he said thoughtfully.

"I'm sure pathology has already told you about any suspicious-looking traumas."

Will nodded. The elevator door opened and they walked out and toward the cafeteria.

"What is especially puzzling to me," Terri continued, "is the selectivity of the deficiency. One woman lacking vitamin C and another lacking B and of course the speed with which they each went into the deficiency ailments."

"Yes," Will said. "I had detectives question Kristin Martin's grandmother last night and according to her, the girl showed no signs of illness, and today, questioning her employer, fellow employees, we've come up with the same sort of puzzling description we had when we spoke to the people who knew Paige Thorndyke: she was full of energy, healthy looking, no complaints of pains or any of the other symptoms."

Terri listened and nodded. They went to the counter and began to choose their dinner.

"Let me get this," he offered at the cashier. "Expense budget."

She smiled and went to a table far enough away from nurses and doctors having their dinners. Some recognized the district attorney immediately. Will Dennis sat across from her.

"Someone has already suggested terrorism, you know," he mentioned as he shook his lemonade container.

"Terrorism? Here? Why?"

He shrugged.

"They've got to start somewhere and make an example so they can throw the country into a panic like they did with anthrax."

Terri smirked.

"We've become a nation of paranoids." She started to eat and then thought of something. "Do you know if Paige Thorndyke knew Kristin Martin?"

"We're working on that, but at the moment it appears they did not have any sort of friendship or relationship, nor did they frequent the same places, although Kristin did go to the dance club Paige went to the night she died. Kristin was there more frequently."

"I see. I would hope you might find something, some connection that would help us all understand any of this. Nothing at either crime scene?" she asked.

"No, nothing yet."

"I even feel funny calling them crime scenes. You haven't established any crime was committed, right? I mean, it looks like Kristin Martin might have been raped, I suppose, but unless Paige Thorndyke was
kidnapped and brought to that motel forcibly, a woman having sex is not a crime in this country, at least not yet," she added.

Will Dennis smiled and began to eat. She pecked at her own food.

"Once this comes out, you will probably see a run on vitamins," Terri said.

"Maybe the vitamin companies or a company is behind it then, huh?"

She paused and looked at him. He was half serious, she thought. Talk about rampant paranoia.

"Look," she said leaning back, a little more frustrated and confused by this meeting. "I'm like what's-her-name in
Silence of the Lambs
here, practically a trainee called upon to help solve something experts are struggling to understand."